11/24/14 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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It's the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent in the UK.
That's independent.co.uk.
You can also find all he writes at unz.com.
He's the author of the books Muqtada and The Jihadi's Return.
Each of those about one and the other side of the sectarian war raging in what used to be called Iraq right now.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
Fine, thank you.
Great, great.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
So the latest piece is called The Trauma of the Last Six Months Has Overwhelmed the Remaining Christians in Iraq.
Can you please tell us about the Christians of Iraq?
Well, the Christians have been in Iraq for almost 2,000 years.
In 1991, there were about one and a half million of them, mostly in Baghdad in the northern city of Mosul.
They had monasteries.
They had very ancient churches.
Then by 2003, they were down to a million.
And now they're down to 250,000, and about half of those are refugees.
They're living in terrible conditions.
Ones I saw were living in a half-completed shopping mall in little cabins, dark little cabins that the UN High Commission for Refugees had built.
Refugees had built there.
ISIS, the Islamic State, had driven them out, or they'd fled.
I talked to one woman who had her baby snatched just by somebody from the Islamic State who just was getting on a bus when she tried to get him back.
He said he'd kill her unless she got on the bus.
Another woman and her husband had to pretend to become Muslims to protect that family, finally escaped.
So the Christian community in Iraq is finally being destroyed.
I mean, you know, there are many arguments about the invasion of 2003.
But I guess there are winners and losers and so forth.
One group of people that sure has lost out big time is the Christians of Iraq.
And now, really, the al-Qaeda in Iraq, the forebears of the Islamic State, they basically had their wars against Yazidis and Christians of different types back then.
They were big parts of the refugees really since 2003, right?
This is just the very culmination of it all, is that it?
Yeah, I mean, it's got a lot worse.
So, you know, these were people who were sort of forced.
There was a dribble of people emigrating before to Australia, to the US, to elsewhere.
But there wasn't a sort of mass onslaught on their community.
Old townships with 50,000 people in them had to cut and run.
Cut and run.
And the Yazidis, it's even worse, because they're treated, you know, often there's an analogy making people say, oh, some group of people were treated, you know, that somebody behaved like the Nazis.
Well, actually, the Islamic State behaved exactly like the Nazis.
They regard the Yazidis as apostates, as heretics to be murdered, the women to be raped, to be enslaved.
And that's exactly what they've done.
You know, there are 400,000 people who have fled into Kurdistan, again, living in pretty terrible conditions.
Well, and now speaking of that, you reported back a few months ago when Mosul first fell and the Islamic State really came roaring back into Iraq the way that they did, that some of your sources talked about how they had done a census in the neighborhood of how old is everybody's daughter because we might just want to marry her and this kind of thing.
So I don't think anybody who remembers the last war can hear stuff like that without immediately thinking of the awakening movement when the local Iraqis said that, you know, despite all of y'all's talk about Islam being your mandate and everything, this is our country, not yours.
And we will not take orders from the likes of you and turn on them.
Of course, everybody in the American media likes to give Petraeus all the credit for all of that.
But what had happened was the Iraqi population had just turned on them.
And so I know that you've talked a lot about this and the relative power between ISIS now compared to al-Qaeda in Iraq back in 06.
But I mean, just how solid is the Islamic State's power when they are such brutes, as you say, that they cannot help but make everyone hate their guts everywhere that they go?
Well, I think it's more solid than it looks, unfortunately.
One, because, you know, terror works.
There are lots of people in Mosul who are unhappy.
I'm in the big northern city with two million people and who are unhappy at the women being forced to wear the niqab and be entirely covered in this sort of black cloak, black cloak, who don't like the way ISIS blew up some of their mosques, famous shrines, and persecuted the Christians and so forth.
There isn't much, you know, unhappiness is different from action.
And it's not clear what action they could take.
These, Mosul was occupied by the Iraqi government.
Most of the weapons were taken.
And this is a well-organized, very suspicious, very violent movement.
So even if they are unhappy, I don't think there's much they can do about it.
So I'm sorry to put it this way.
I know it's kind of silly, but if you could quantify it on a scale of power 1 to 10, could you put al-Qaeda in Iraq as of 06 versus the Islamic State now, you know, some kind of relative?
Yeah, I think Islamic al-Qaeda in Iraq may be between 2 and 3 for a brief period, but not for very long.
The Islamic State, you know, rules an area, is in total control of an area the size of Great Britain in Iraq and Syria.
It's about 250,000 square kilometers.
That's a very big area.
And they've held most of that since June.
And they aren't losing it.
So, you know, they've been bombed.
They suffer some losses, but they can probably afford to suffer some losses.
So these guys are not imploding.
They're not even really retreating.
So, you know, six months there, you know, their battle slogan is the Islamic State will remain.
The Islamic State will expand.
And they're kind of doing it.
You know, they're not at the pace.
There's a bit of a stalemate.
They've suffered some losses.
But unfortunately, they're not really on the back foot yet.
So, you know, there isn't much locals can do about it.
They have their own sort of intelligence service that they seek out potential opponents and kill them or jail them or torture them or whatever.
So I can't see them going down.
And their opponents are still very divided.
You know, the U.S. is having its airstrikes, but and was compelled at the last moment to ally to support the Syrian Kurds who are fighting the Islamic State at Kobani.
But at the same time, the U.S. hasn't really made up its mind to unite or even cooperate with other people who are fighting the Islamic State, such as the Syrian army, Shia militias or other things.
So this American policy remains very ambivalent and consequently pretty ineffective.
All right.
Now, so one of your recent articles talks about the number of fighters there.
The CIA says that, well, maybe they got about thirty five hundred or thirty thirty five thousand fires, 30,000, something like that.
I talked with Mitchell Prother about that, and he started ticking off places where the Islamic State has a fight going on and are holding their own in Anbar up in just kind of to the south and east, almost near the Iranian border there, as you mentioned, Kobani.
Still, they're holding down Fallujah and Mosul.
And so I don't think he had like a real number to guess, but he was saying it's certainly better than 30,000.
I wonder, you know, kind of back of the envelope math there.
How many how many guys do you think they have?
How many fighters do you think they have now?
And I don't know exactly how you separate, you know, their core from their new recruits or those kinds of things.
But yeah, I mean, this was an interview I did with Fouad Hussein, who's the chief of staff of President Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which is effectively pretty well an independent state.
And he was saying, you know, it's really absurd to think that they can be attacking, the Islamic State can be attacking all over the place in northern Iraq, around Baghdad, in northern Syria and western Syria, unless they number in the hundreds of thousands.
Now, some of these will be local people, you know, that they've recruited.
When you have an area that big, you can recruit local people, local young men.
And this is an area where there are no jobs.
So a lot of local young men will want some sort of job.
They pay about $400 a month, not a lot, but better than nothing.
And on top of that, there are a lot of people who will be inspired by their vision, by their ideology.
So Fouad Hussein estimates there are about 10, 12 million people ruled by the Islamic State.
I think it's considerably less than that, but let's say it's six or seven million.
They can still recruit a lot of people.
And there's no doubt that they are.
You know, I've talked to a lot of people who've had recent contact with the Islamic State around Mosul.
And, you know, I said, you know, do you meet any foreigners?
And they said, no, they're all Iraqis.
So I think they're recruiting a lot of people.
I think that 30,000, I don't know where this figure comes from, where the CIA got it from, but I think that it's far greater than that.
It's over 100,000.
And probably, you know, in these villages, all the young men have arms at a certain point, you can mobilize them.
So then we're up to, you know, well into the hundreds of thousands.
Wow.
So now, obviously, you're saying you think they have the power to hold the territory they've got for now.
What about further expansion?
Or have they already basically hit the limits of their outer borders?
It's more difficult in Iraq because now they're getting, moving into Kurdish territory, moving into Shia territory out of, they come out of the Sunni community.
Also that, to a degree, Baghdad and the Kurds have, I wouldn't say they've got their act together, but they sort of, they aren't running away in the way they did previously.
You've got Shia militias that were very sectarian, very violent around Baghdad, but they're pretty powerful.
They've got them aided by American airstrikes, the Kurds are organizing.
So they're facing greater opposition.
And in Syria, of course, they failed to take Kobani.
But even so, you know, their opponents are very divided.
You know, you suddenly hear on CNN that the US, the White House has decided that, you know, Assad has to go before anything is to be done in Syria.
But, you know, Assad's army is the main opponent of the Islamic State.
Assad goes, this is a big plus for the Islamic State.
So I think the administration hasn't really thought through how it's going to fight this war, if it wants to win it.
Yeah, it's all domestic politics, obviously, are calling those shots, because on the face of it, that's crazy.
That's like saying if France wanted to intervene against the South in the American Civil War, that they would have had to regime change Abraham Lincoln first, before they can go attack the South.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Exactly.
I mean, it's sort of kind of weird, you know, I suppose.
I mean, I see that, you know, Defense Secretary Hagel is just gone today in Washington.
But it doesn't hasn't come across to me.
Maybe it's known to you, you know, exactly why he's gone.
What's the policy he seemed to be advocating seemed to be that of the White House.
Maybe it's a general sense of frustration that things are going wrong.
Yeah, I'm not really sure.
I mean, one of the leaks in Bloomberg News today says that he was tired of arguing with the White House staff that didn't really know anything or have any experience.
And so he didn't really speak in the meetings.
He would just call the president when he got back to his own office, and then go through and debunk everything that they had said.
And I guess my understanding is that he had been against bombing Assad, he and Dempsey and Obama had really all three not really wanted to follow through on bombing Assad back a year and a year and a couple of months ago, August, September 2013, that he'd been hesitant there.
And as we're talking about the policy of attacking Assad now or doing anything, as Biden was just saying to Erdogan the other day, two days ago, that we're going to continue to work on this transition against Assad.
It's absolutely insane or completely nonsensical anyway.
So it's easy to imagine that that's what this is about is somebody is having trouble digesting the fact that we're backing the Shia side of the sectarian war in Iraq, but we're still backing the Sunni side of the sectarian war in Syria.
Yeah, you know, it's a fantastic mess.
And, you know, they're bombing the Islamic State, but that's not defeating them.
That it's sort of, in fact, you know, it probably means that in their areas, the other jihadis will rally to the Islamic State.
So I think that maybe Hegel is carrying the can for a general sort of failure to devise and implement a feasible policy towards the Islamic State.
I mean, I think they're going to sort of fight it or they're not.
And I think that they've done a bit, but not very much.
All right.
Now, earlier this year, I believe it was early in the spring, you went and actually interviewed Muqtada al-Sadr, the subject of your previous book, and he complained about all the sectarianism.
And if I remember right, he kind of pointed the finger at Maliki for doing his part and making sectarianism worse.
And the way I remember it, even though he did take part in the civil war in 06 and 07, he also was always much more nationalist and anti-Iranian and anti-American than the other Shiite leaders.
And I wonder what you think, you know, how you measure his position in all this.
Is the Mahdi army just another auxiliary of Iran at this point, like the Bata Brigade?
Or is there a possibility of some actual reconciliation here if somebody like Sadr was to take the lead?
I think it's difficult to do.
I mean, I think he has a rather guilty conscience over what happened in 2006-07, that his sort of Mahdi army, his militia, became a purely sectarian force, a Shiite force that was killing Sunnis.
At the same time, the Shiite are coming under intense pressure from the Islamic State.
There will be lots of car bombs and suicide bombs in Shia areas.
So you need some sort of defense force.
I mean, his feeling about foreign opposition, I mean, he told me foreign intervention is he said, you know, the problem about Iraq is, you know, that you have a domestic problem and you call in one bunch of foreigners and then they come in and then you want to sort of get rid of them.
So you call in some other foreigners, you know, and it all gets worse.
And, you know, his analogy was, you know, that you got a mouse in the house, you call in a cat, you know, and you get fed up with the cat and you call in a dog and finally you end up with an elephant in the house.
And, you know, then things just get worse and worse.
So he's against foreign intervention.
The problem is that the situation is so sectarianized in Iraq now that, you know, when you talk, I was talking to the North, to Christians, to Yazidis, all these people feel that when the Islamic State came that their Sunni neighbors cooperated with them and took their houses and took their cars and money and so forth.
Now, this may be just the kind of hysteria you have when people have been driven out from their land.
But it's believed.
So it's very difficult to think that you could ever have mixed areas in Iraq again.
The degree of ethnic and sectarian hatred is really very great now.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's funny to hear, you know, I actually read Andrew Bacevich saying that it is, you know, basically gospel in Washington, D.C., that there's such a thing as Iraq and that this is a fight between just like Donald Rumsfeld days.
This is a fight between the Iraqi people and the terrorists.
In fact, Matthew Ho, who was a Defense Department and a State Department official, told me on the show a couple of weeks ago that back in 2006, he was in some of these highest level meetings where it was just absolutely verboten for anyone to even acknowledge the truth that we're fighting on the side of the bottom brigade against the Sunni based militia, that this is a sectarian thing.
The Sunni insurgency, I might say, that no, the narrative inside the highest level meetings was the same as the one on Fox News, that we're fighting for the Iraqi people and its democracy against the terrorists.
And apparently, according to Bacevich, this is exactly the thinking that's going on in D.C. right now.
So the conversation that we're having, they're not even having this on the on the National Security Council.
They're not even being honest with each other about who's who and who's on whose side and what it all even means.
So no wonder they can't come to a policy if they can't get beyond their own talking points, even at the highest councils of discussion.
Yeah, I think it's so, you know, that they said, well, you know, we want a more inclusive government in Baghdad, which includes the Sunnis.
And then we sort of have a new government.
But it really doesn't make much difference.
You know, it's still very much Shia.
It's still very corrupt.
You know, the thing to remember about the whole Iraqi sort of political military machine is that no officer in the Iraqi army ever gets a job without paying for it.
He pays for it, but you make money out of it, you know, through kickbacks from soldiers who get a salary but never go near the barracks or you have salaries for soldiers that don't really exist.
And of course, you get money for food, for paying for non-existent soldiers.
All that kind of stuff means that, you know, people hold these jobs in the army, whether a colonel or a captain or a major in general in order to make money.
They don't do it to fight.
And that was true six months ago.
And so far as I know, it's still true now.
All right now, so but what are the reports of the progress, at least of the special forces teams and so forth at the Baiji oil refinery?
That's a they finally have broken that siege.
Is that right?
Yeah, you know, there are some units that will fight, you know, and you can do some things, but probably not enough.
You know, the and they're sort of backed by the Sunni militias and by the Shia militias, I meant to say.
So I think it's very difficult to rebuild the army or rebuild a state, a government, which is really a kleptocracy.
You know, you can try.
You might have some successes, but I think that it's probably going to be pretty limited right now.
So I'm sorry, I don't have the map in front of me, but I think I'm right that the Baiji refinery is north of Tikrit.
Right.
So if the so-called Iraqi army and their militias were have control of that land, does that mean that if they can't outright invade Tikrit that they can besiege it and drive the Islamic state out of it at some point there?
Yeah, there's not many people left in Tikrit, you know, mostly because of the bombing and so forth.
Most people have fled.
The Islamic state might fight for it.
They might not.
They're not in a great position there because they've got the Iraqi army before in front and behind them.
They've moved some of their forces out of there.
That's a part of Iraq is, I guess, predominantly Sunni, but there are some big Shia towns as well.
And the Kurds are just to the north in that Kirkuk.
So, you know, they might have some successes there.
On the other hand, you know, this type of war, it's, you have to wait a bit longer because the Islamic state, you know, is fighting hard in Anbar and having successes there, but doesn't seem to be seem to have moved its forces out of around Tikrit.
You know, it often in this type of sort of semi guerrilla warfare, it often looks as though one side is winning, but it isn't.
It's just the other side hasn't decided to fight at this moment.
You know, we're going to fight later.
Right.
Fight where it's easiest.
Well, so what about Kirkuk?
Because I know the Kurds want it.
I don't know what the percentage is now, ethnicity wise, between Kurds and Arabs.
And I guess there's no more Iraqi army there.
But can the Kurdish Peshmerga keep the Islamic state out of Kirkuk for the long haul, you think?
I think so, yes, because, you know, it matters a lot to them.
That's where the oil fields are.
I think they'll fight very hard for Kirkuk and they'll probably hold it.
But it'll mean a lot of fighting because to the south and to the west, the Islamic state has a lot of strength in some very tough Sunni areas.
So I think you'll have this sort of sectarian ethnic war going on with one thing that's happening, which is pretty ominous in Iraq and Syria, but particularly in Iraq, because both sides are so terrified of each other that you have these long sort of battle lines.
Each side, if they concentrate their forces, can punch through.
But the civilian population on the other side is so terrified these days that it immediately takes to its heels.
So you have lots of Kurdish refugees who've fled from around Mosul.
You have Yazidis, you have Christians, but you also have Sunni Arabs from Anbar who've kind of got nowhere to go because they can't go to Kurdistan because the Kurds hate them and they can't go into Shia areas because of a similar region.
So Iraq is turning into another Syria in terms of a big chunk of the population having become refugees or internally displaced people, as the aid agencies call them.
And that sort of desperate nomadic population of people who have fled their homes but don't have anywhere to go is growing by the day.
All right.
Well, with that, I'll let you go.
Thank you so much for your time again on the show, Patrick.
Great one.
Oh, thank you very much, Scott.
All right, Shaul, that is the heroic Patrick Coburn.
He's the author of The Jihadi's Return.
Brand new out.
Find it at ORBooks.com.
That's ORBooks.com.
And before that, the book was Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq.
And find all of his archives at independent.co.uk and unz.com, unz.com.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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